Netflix Site Down, Hackers To Blame?

Netflix is raising its prices for unlimited services by 60 percent, the company said Tuesday. Photo: REUTERS

If one thought to watch a movie online on Father's Day or just to spend Sunday time on Netflix, they were in for a surprise.

The website of Netflix, a popular online video service company, was briefly down for a while on June 19, triggering suspicions of a hack attack.

The site, which went down at around 8.30 Eastern Time, carried the following message: We are sorry, the Netflix website and the ability to instantly watch movies are both temporarily unavailable.

Our engineers are working hard to bring the site and ability to watch instantly back up as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience and, again we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

The site, however, was restored at around 12.30 Eastern Time and users were able to login.

Netflix may have expected patience from users, who are not patient enough and just took up the issue to the internet and bombarded the site's outage on Twitter.

Following are some of the twitter messages, hitting out at Netflix:

@coryroush wrote I can't access Netflix. I'm not... I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do now? Panic is setting in.

@ssscarletletter typed It's father's day and netflix isn't working.

@dusteallen tweeted So @Netflix usually just gets money from me, but the one night I actually want to use it... It doesn't work. Really?! Ugh.

@Eddie_Bonilla wrote CONSTANT glitches and technical difficulties are now the new features of @netflix , thx alot for takin my money and givin nothing.

Since Netflix hasn't given an official statement about what caused the outage and surging hack attacks on several high-profile websites, one cannot rule out the possibility of a cyber attack on Netflix website.

Recently, hackers have gone wild and video game developer Sega Corp apparently became the latest victim of a network breach and information belonging to 1.3 million customers had been stolen from its database.

Hackers have recently attacked the sites of IMF, Citibank and Sony.

The latest high-profile victim was the International Monetary Fund, whose computer network was breached by what was believed to be a government backed effort.

Hackers even broke in to a Senate website and released data stolen from the legislative body's computer servers.

Recently, banking giant Citibank confirmed that credit card data of about 200,000 of its North American customers have been hacked. The event marked the largest attack on a bank in the US to date.

Before that, US military contractor Lockheed Martin was compromised as hackers used Lockheed's own secure id technology to access its networks.

Even Google has accused Chinese hackers of targeting the Gmail accounts of U.S. government officials.

In April, Sony had data stolen from the 77 million users of the PlayStation network, one of the worst security breaches of its kind. There was then a second attack when another 24.6 million computer game users might have had their personal details stolen.

The website of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) was hacked and hackers posted a hoax story claiming that rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive and living in New Zealand.

Such hack attacks show the pervasive lack of preparedness against cyber attacks, so much so that a loosely-organized group of enthusiasts can deface and embarrass the largest corporations and media organizations in the world.